Tom Grant's Mysterious Peninsula Client revealed

Posted without permission from Tom Grant or Mathew Richer. From the 2016 book "The Mysterious death of Kurt Cobain: Suicide or Murder—you decide"

"Chapter one: Sunday, April 3, 1994—On the surface, spending Easter Sunday in the company of a prostitute may not seem like the Christian thing to do. But she was the client; not me, and she was in really big trouble. Prostitution is an ugly business. I had arrested lots of prostitutes when I was a police officer in Los Angeles, and it was the part of the job I detested the most. Prostitutes are typically a nightmare to negotiate with because they are usually high on drugs and they often bite, scratch, and kick you with their high heels when you place them under arrest. The glamorous side of prostitution often depicted by Hollywood always seemed like a complete fiction to me; that is, until I met Karina. I have lived and worked in Los Angeles most of my life, and have seen many beautiful Hollywood starlets in person. But none of them could compare to Karina. This woman simply did not know how to walk into a room without turning every head in it. Karina (not her real name) was a sophisticated, twenty-four year old Swedish blonde who had been working the past few years as a call girl earning $5,000 or more a night. But despite the money, Karina found prostitution to be a hard life. She wanted out of the lifestyle, and out of Los Angeles. The problem was that her employer—her Madame, so to speak—was not about to allow such a valuable asset to walk away. That is where I came in. Karina was scheduled to meet with her Madame at 8:30 AM in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel on Sunday, April 3, 1994. The purpose of the meeting was to break the news to her Madame that she was quitting. But because the Madame was always accompanied by bodyguards, my role was to sit nearby and provide security if trouble started. We arrived at the Peninsula Hotel around 7:30 AM. Karina took a seat in the lobby and I sat nearby and pretended to read a newspaper. The hotel entrance was behind me, but I could see it clearly through the large mirror hanging on the wall opposite me. One of my investigators, 29-year-old Ben Klugman, was seated at the lobby bar nursing a cup of coffee with a clear view of the entire room. Next, we did that thing that private investigators often do quite a bit of: we sat and waited for something to happen. Eventually, a stocky man in his 20s wearing a leather jacket and dress slacks entered the lobby. He glanced at Karina, and then looked anxiously about the room. He turned abruptly and exited the hotel. How were we made so fast? These people were obviously very good. We waited for another hour and then realized that the Madame was never going to show up. So we decided to return to my office and have a strategy meeting.

After we discussed the situation for about an hour, the telephone rang. This was a surprise because I wasn't expecting any calls on a Sunday morning."

The Mysterious crush of Tom Grant: Karina or Alexandria Datig? You decide.

The following is an article from 2013, 3 years prior to the publishing of Tom Grant and Mathew Richer's Book. 

How Ex-Call Girl Helped Nab Notorious Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss

November 25, 2013 

LOS ANGELES—A former high-class call girl who worked for Heidi Fleiss in the 1990s is sharing how she helped turn in the notorious Hollywood madam.

Alexandra Datig was 20 years old when she met Fleiss.

"I was at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard, and I was handed a phone number by one of her drug-runners. On the number it said, 'Call this girl," she said.

Datig said hooking up with Fleiss was a means to an end. "Meeting Heidi, for me, was an answer to a short-term problem, which was paying my rent and putting food on my table. I really didn't want to be a prostitute. That was not my plan," she said. Asked what she was expected to do, Datig said, "I was expected to have, most of the time, just a straightforward sex act. I was given designer drugs, I was given prescription drugs, a lot of cocaine." Datig said the tempting lifestyle - "I was paid $10,000 a day, plus jewelry, plus first-class plane tickets" - came with a heavy price. "I was asked to go to a hotel. The client held my plane ticket and my money. And for three days, he would come and hit me on the head and pull out my hair. When he was finished hitting me, he would leave the room," she said. Datig said most of the girls worked when they wanted to work, but they had to follow Fleiss' rules. "You were not allowed to have long hair, you were not allowed to be too pretty, you were not allowed to wear too much makeup or be too glamorous ... because someone would fall in love with you and take you away. And then she loses the business," she said. After less than a year, Datig wanted out. She saved enough money to pursue an acting and modeling career. Datig said Fleiss seemed reluctant to let her go. "I showed her my portfolio and I had a conversation with her saying that I wanted to get out. And when she saw the pictures, it was almost as if it was not OK," she said. Asked when she decided to bring Fleiss down, Datig said, "When she started to become obsessed with becoming a notorious public figure as a pimp." That's when Datig turned to a now-retired undercover Beverly Hills police detective, who wished to remain unidentified. "Alex called me up and introduced herself. She gave us a background and she gave us the in," he said. By then, a task force had started an investigation into Fleiss. Datig became the key informant. "She painted the picture of what the organization was at that high level," said the ex-detective. "What type of customers Heidi had."

"I provided credit card numbers, I provided information on air flights, on phone numbers," Datig said.

Armed with that knowledge, detectives planned to meet Fleiss at a ritzy bar. "We knew that she was having a function there and we borrowed a Ferrari. People [were] having drinks and then she was playing the hostess. There were probably six or seven girls. I basically was able to get her phone number that night and introduce myself as a businessman. And kept it very generic ... said maybe we can try to do business in the future and that'd I'd like to call her," the former detective said. In 1993, authorities conducted a sting at the Beverly Hilton that would bring down the madam and her ring. "We had the girls in one big room. And once they started to undress ... then we called it. And the officers came in and arrested everyone," said the ex-detective. "We arrested the girls and we had another team at Heidi's house waiting to arrest her." In the following years, Fleiss was convicted of pandering, tax evasion and money laundering. She got three years in prison. "I was terrified for my life. I had people calling me anonymously and named, threatening to kill me," Datig said. The threats eventually stopped. Twenty years later, Datig has turned her life around. She doesn't want to be known as a former prostitute, but a human trafficking survivor. As a member of the Los Angeles County Task Force for Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, Datig is helping to shape drug policy and aiding human trafficking victims. "This is a serious issue haunting all of our communities. And it takes a village to create a prostitute, and it starts at a very young age," she said. 

End of article. 

The Orchestration of the Beverly Hilton Sting

​Realizing that an amicable, negotiated exit was impossible and fearing for her long-term safety, Datig made a calculated, immensely risky decision to dismantle the operation from the inside. She initiated contact with a highly specialized unit of local law enforcement, specifically reaching out to an undercover Beverly Hills police detective named Sammy Lee II. Detective Lee was the son of Olympic gold medalist diver Samuel Lee, adding a layer of local prominence to the ensuing investigation. Datig formally offered herself as a key confidential informant, providing the task force with the intricate, deeply guarded operational details necessary to bypass Fleiss’s robust security measures. 

​The intelligence Datig provided was exhaustive and operationally devastating. She supplied authorities with direct access to the organization's logistical backbone, including client credit card numbers, private airline flight records, unlisted phone directories, and a detailed hierarchical map of Fleiss's elite, celebrity customer base. This massive internal defection allowed a multi-agency task force—comprising the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the state Attorney General’s office, and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Agency—to construct an airtight, highly coordinated sting operation.  ​The execution of the sting was a masterpiece of operational theater, designed specifically to appeal to Fleiss’s strict, unyielding requirements for wealth, status, and exclusivity. Detective Sammy Lee assumed the persona of a highly affluent Hawaiian businessman. To cement this lucrative cover, authorities acquired a Ferrari Testarossa and arranged a preliminary, seemingly accidental encounter at the exclusive Rangoon Racquet Club on April 6, 1993. Lee, accompanied by another state undercover agent, infiltrated a social gathering where Fleiss was playing hostess, sitting near a table of women accompanied by Jennifer Young (daughter of actor Gig Young). By projecting immense wealth and intentionally keeping the conversation generic, Lee successfully acquired Fleiss’s direct contact information without triggering her highly attuned paranoia, laying the groundwork for a larger, multi-person transaction.  ​The trap was ultimately sprung two months later, on June 9, 1993, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Detective Lee contacted Fleiss and requested entertainment for a group of associates. Fleiss, meticulously vetting the request to ensure no "drugged-out freaks" with "dirty fingernails" would tarnish her elite brand, dispatched four women to the hotel suite. Among those sent was Samantha Burdette, a former teenage runway model from Colorado who closely resembled the late actress Natalie Wood. Crucially, Fleiss also dispatched a quantity of cocaine alongside the women, explicitly tying the pandering operation to narcotics distribution.  Once the women arrived at the Hilton suite, engaged with the undercover officers, and began to undress, the officers triggered the arrest code. Simultaneously, a secondary tactical team executed a massive raid on Fleiss’s Benedict Canyon estate. The 27-year-old madam was arrested in her driveway while taking out the trash, infamously surprised that the dozens of armed officers swarming her property needed to ask her to identify herself. 

​The fallout from the arrest was catastrophic, sending shockwaves through the Hollywood elite. Within a week, major producers, actors, and real estate heirs were frantically calling Fleiss's tapped phones, terrified of exposure. Fleiss was charged with multiple felony counts of pandering, pimping, and narcotics possession. Her subsequent trials became an international media spectacle, culminating in a federal conviction for tax evasion and money laundering that resulted in a 37-month prison sentence, alongside a concurrent state sentence for attempted pandering. 

​In the aftermath, Fleiss attempted to retaliate against the officers who orchestrated her downfall. In 1996, she appeared on the KROQ radio program "Loveline" and made false, damaging statements accusing Detective Sammy Lee II, his father, and LAPD officer Patricia Corso of being homosexuals and sexual deviants. This resulted in a successful slander lawsuit against Fleiss, ordering her to pay $340,000 in damages to the officers and the elder Lee. Datig, meanwhile, faced severe death threats and anonymous harassment from powerful individuals terrified that their names would be exposed, forcing her to temporarily live in terror. She ultimately survived the ordeal, transitioning into a highly visible career as a political commentator, a designer of the Front Page Index, and a leading advocate against human trafficking. Tom Grant, an ex-LAPD officer turned private detective, recorded in his memoirs that he was hired to provide security for a high-end prostitute attempting to escape her powerful "Madame". Grant claimed this specific event took place on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1994, precisely at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. According to his detailed account, the client was a 24-year-old "Swedish blonde" prostitute whom he referred to under the pseudonym "Karina". Karina was purportedly earning upwards of $5,000 a night but desperately wanted out of the lifestyle and out of Los Angeles entirely. The problem, Grant noted, was that her employer was not about to let such a valuable asset walk away. Consequently, a scheduled 8:30 AM lobby meeting was arranged to break the news to her dangerous employer, with Grant providing covert overwatch. ​

​A forensic analysis of this narrative, however, reveals a massive intelligence failure on the part of the private investigator, raising serious questions about the accuracy of his historical timeline. The biographical markers provided by Grant align perfectly with the exact plight of Alexandra Datig, a blonde 24 year old European seeking an exit from the industry and navigating the dangerous waters of defying a powerful madam. However, Grant explicitly misidentified his own client's nationality. Datig was not Swedish; she was Swiss, born in Luzern, Switzerland. 

​Furthermore, the timing of the event is deeply problematic and contradictory. If "Karina" was indeed Datig, the timeline presents a glaring paradox. Fleiss’s operation had already been raided and dismantled in June 1993, with Datig acting as the key informant. If Datig was the informant who brought Fleiss down a year prior, a formal "resignation" meeting in a public hotel lobby in April 1994 defies all tactical logic; the relationship would have already been thoroughly destroyed, and Datig would have been in hiding from the aforementioned death threats. 

​This leads to a necessary analytical conclusion that Grant had concocted yet another alibi based on an earlier event. Which leads with the question of why the need for an alibi at all? Why go to manufacture such an elaborate exaggerated story? Could this have anything to do with an earlier version posted online by Courtney Love wherein she states—"he tells me that he comes to the Hotel I'm at a lot now for hooker business, I can't figure that out now—something to do with blackmailing people with hookers, I can't remember."? 

Why not just dismiss her story? Perhaps he was part of the tapping, he wasn't a PI just a body guard, and it's been said that the CAA is basically a 12-step program for failed businessmen—a claim that Grant ascribes to himself. It's a free for all agency, one doesn't have to be part of the CAA to get in on the action, it's entirely open source and no secrets are kept, you are basically playing a game of Risk with every wannabe fixer there.

"I got audio of such 'n such celebrity saying this about such 'n such celebrity" says Bauer, casually.

"Oh that's my client! You leak it—I fix it" says Douglas with a wink and topped with 'click' sound.

Bauer reaches out his hand...  "Only if you match the difference of the leak offer" he says with a chuckle

The two shake hands as they jinx eachother - "Deal!"